The Supreme Court and the Making of Public Policy in Contemporary China

Abstract

Post-Mao China saw profound social, economic and legal changes. This paper analyzes an often neglected aspect of these transformations: the evolution of the Supreme People’s Court (SPC) into an increasingly influential political actor in national law and policy-making. The SPC has self-consciously redefined its mandate to manage state-sponsored legal reforms by performing an expansive range of new functions such as issuing abstract rules, tightening control over lower courts and crafting out a constitutional jurisprudence of its own at the expense of other powerful state actors. It is more assertive than ever its own vision of how law should develop in the contemporary People’s Republic of China (PRC) SPC action can be broadly consistent with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) interests, autonomous and expansive at the same time. However, the SPC’s reform initiatives are inevitably constrained by the vested interests of major bureaucratic players as well as the Party’s insistence on maintaining the Court as an integral administrative agency of its public security system.